Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - USMCA Comes Up Next Summer Canadians don’t like the uncertainty produced by the ongoing trade tensions between Canada and the United States. But a quick end is unlikely. The US/ Mexico/Canada trade agreement is coming up for its five year review in July of 2026. Any trade deals struck now are going to have to be reviewed again in 8 months. Most of the effort...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Selling With No Regrets If you own a stock that has become a huge financial windfall, the question that needs answering, is whether you should sell all of it, some of it, or hang on for even bigger gains. An investor in this position should ask themselves two things. How would I feel if I sold nothing and it dropped to zero? …And….How would I feel if I sold e...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Depletion If you have ever spent any time running on a treadmill, you have an appreciation for how difficult it is to manage an oil and gas company. It takes focussed effort to not go backward. The hidden enemy is depletion. Each year the reserves you have become less and less. This requires continual exploration and development. The amount of spend needed to...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Market Timing vs Regular Buying I recently looked at a three decade study comparing dollar cost averaging to buying stocks at the market low every year. Dollar cost averaging is simply taking a fixed amount and investing it regularly - usually monthly into stocks. One would assume that the investor,who could magically buy only at market lows each year, would...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Great Performers Are Rare Most of the markets long term gains, come from a very small basket of stocks. Just 1.3% of the companies that trade in the US, account for all the market gains over the last three decades. Outside America it is even more concentrated. There, less than 1% of companies are accountable for all the appreciation. Out of a total sample of...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canada’s Sold Its Gold Canada is the only G7 country whose Central Bank doesn ‘t have any significant gold reserves. Both conservative and Liberal governments in the 80’s and 90’s sold off the majority of our gold stockpile, using the rationale that it was a loser, and they wanted to put the proceeds into more productive assets. Their major selling came at a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Hope Isn’t A Strategy Investors as a rule are an optimistic bunch. Most will be able to tell you what they will do if a stock they purchased goes up. They generally have a target price, and plans for the money, once it reaches that goal. Yet very few ever think about the downside. What if the investment doesn’t work out? Why might that happen? What actions ne...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Big Money Is Betting On Trump People who don’t like Trump or his economic policies, have been avoiding US markets because they believe his initiatives will lead to disaster. They shake their heads in disbelief as stocks continue to go up and up, and they get left further and further behind. People who think Trump is a disaster, might end up being right, b...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Central Banks Are Buying Gold The US Federal Government deficit for 2025 is going to exceed 2 trillion dollars. The third highest in history. American fiscal irresponsibility and aggressive trade policies, punishing friend and foe alike, have motivated foreign countries to slowly shift assets. Central banks used to hold huge amounts of US Government bonds, be...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - EV Depreciation Anyone who has ever wanted a high end, all electric, European super car, but was put off by the six figure price tag on the showroom floor - just got a break. On auction sites like supercarblondie, where high end iron is bought and sold, the bargains are amazing. Two year old, low mileage, EV’s priced at $150,000 plus when new, are now being f...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Detecting A Scam Many scams have telltale emotional signs you need to be on the lookout for. If they make you afraid. Like an email from the CRA threatening prosecution because you supposedly didn’t pay your taxes. If they appeal to your vanity. Like texts from scammers who pose as headhunters, saying they were referred to you with a dream job offer. If they...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Economic Spin Spin is a marketing term. Spin takes events, or data, and adjusts them to put you, or your organization, in the best possible light. Politicians, companies, even environmental groups use it often and effectively. An example is Electric Vehicles. The spin says that global adoption of EV’s means that peak oil usage is near. The facts without the s...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Gold’s Future Price Investors have been discouraged from buying gold because it is trading at all time highs. However price is only one valuation metric. Historically the value of gold has at times tracked the increase in the amount of money governments print and the inflation it creates. If this metric is used, the price of the yellow metal is still historic...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Making VS. Keeping Money Making big dollars and keeping the money you made are two very different skill sets. Professional athletes are often great earners but pathetic savers. Nearly four out of 5 retired NFL football players are bankrupt or under financial stress. In the National Basketball Association, 2 out of every three retired players are broke after 5...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Tax Benefits of Rebalancing Rebalancing is a technique where you adjust the asset weightings in a portfolio - usually on an annual basis. It is beneficial for two reasons. Rebalancing gets you to sell asset classes that have outperformed and add to those that haven’t done as well - in other words sell high and buy low. It also allows you to tax harvest by...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - elling Is Hard To Do People are not very good at buying stocks, but they are even worse at selling - and that includes the pros. A study between 2000 and 2016, looked at 4.4 million trades done by professional asset managers. They specifically focused on the sell side of these transactions. Whenever the professional manager would sell a security in the portfo...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Long Term Market Cycles Investors need to understand that stock markets move in extended cycles. Long term bull markets tend to last 15 - 20 years. Long term bear markets run 8 to 15 years. The bull market we are currently in, started in 2013 and is still going. The previous bear market, started in 2000 and ran for 13 years. Within these long bull and bear cy...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Markets Historically Expensive Two things make stock markets go up. Rising earnings are one. Historically companies have been able to increase their profits by about 6% per year over the long term. The second is investor willingness to pay higher prices to own shares. This second one is the biggest and most volatile factor. Markets are considered reasonable w...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The World Is Complex Beware of politicians with simple solutions to complex economic problems. Take for example the last bout of inflation we had during Covid, when that number went up to 9.5% annually. Political solutions were simple, and fit easily into 30 second sound bits. Perfect for news spots or commercials. But real world problems are seldom that easy...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Elon Musk Elon Musk has an amazing collection of assets: Tesla - a maker of electric cars, Spacex - the rocket company, Neuralink - which connects the human brain to computers, X - formerly called Twitter, The Boring Company - which digs tunnels and XAI - the arm that develops artificial intelligence and robots. As of last week, the total value of all these c...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Bubble Warnings Bubbles form when a stock sector reaches valuations far exceeding anything these companies can be expected to profitably achieve in the real world. When it finally dawns on investors that hype grossly exceeds reality, they dump their holdings and the bubble pops. Research on 10 different stock bubbles since 1900 shows their average gain was 24...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Sports Memorabilia If you buy right, sports memorabilia can be very profitable. A Mickey Mantle baseball card, sold three years ago for 12.5 million US. Last year, the jersey Babe Ruth wore in the third game of the 1932 World Series went for twenty four million. Recently, Kevin O’Leary, of Shark Tank fame, as part of an investment group, bought an autographed...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Market That Won’t Die This market reminds me of the Russian Monk - Rasputin. In 1914, he was stabbed but survived. Two years later, he was fed cakes laced with cyanide but survived, then given poisoned wine but survived, then shot and survived, and finally shot again and thrown in a frozen river. At that point, he finally drowned. Just like Rasputin, this c...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI Hype The tech bros anticipate spending 3 to 4 trillion dollars building out artificial intelligence infrastructure over the next decade. This total is larger than the combined economic output of Canada and Brazil. The problem is no one is able to tell investors how this will translate into profits for companies outside the tech universe. A disturbing MIT s...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Chinese Cars & Tariffs The reason we put high tariffs on Chinese cars, is they would totally crush our domestic industry if we let them in. For example, BYD, China’s largest vehicle maker, released a car a couple of months ago that cost roughly $19,000 Canadian dollars. This gas electric hybrid is so efficient that it will run 2000 kilometres on a tank of fue...